I'm an LA-based writer and management consultant. I was an adviser and editor for many years for the father of modern leadership studies, the late USC professor Warren Bennis. And over the past twenty years, I’ve been a chief storyteller for USC, during a time in which Bennis and other leaders helped it skyrocket in global reputation and productivity. I bring a different perspective to leadership--some sober perspective about the realities of being "in charge," along with advice on how to tell great stories that mobilize great communities. I've written for dozens of publications around the world, including the Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and Japan Times. I serve as a University Fellow at USC’s Center for Public Diplomacy and am a member of the Pacific Council for International Policy. My book Leadership Is Hell (Figueroa Press, 2014) is available on Amazon; all proceeds benefit programs that make college accessible to promising LA urban schoolchildren.

The Jazz Principle: Why Good Leaders Celebrate Uncertainty

A good manager is in some ways like the conductor of a symphony orchestra. But a truly good manager may well be more like the leader of a jazz combo.

Granted, the parallels between managing an organization and conducting a symphony can be striking: The symphony orchestra is a large enterprise consisting of people with a wide variety of skills. They must play in perfect harmony upon a public stage. Talent must be managed, cajoled and kept in check. And the orchestra takes its cues in obvious ways and subtle ways from the conductor.

If the work to be performed is an overly familiar one, like say, the hundredth performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the members of the orchestra are liable to fall into a sense of routine. It becomes the conductor’s job to re-inspire that passion. All that he or she does serves to remind those he leads of the inner meaning of the work, and to make it come newly alive with each performance.

Yet some top management experts, notably Max De Pree, have come to believe that the role of a manager of an organization could better be likened to a leader of a jazz ensemble. There is more improvisation. There is uncertainty. There is surprise—surprise that is embraced and exploited by the members of the ensemble.

Creativity and Spontaneity as ‘Heroic’ Traits

Improvisation is the ultimate human (ie, heroic) endowment … Flexibility or the ability to swing (or to perform with grace under pressure) is the key to that unique competence which generates the self-reliance and thus the charisma of the hero. –Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues [hat tip to Robert G. O’Meally, Columbia University professor and founder of its Center for Jazz Studies]

During the performance of a tightly scored symphony, any surprise would either be a failure or would lead to one. In jazz, surprise is serendipity. Each member is free to trade in surprise, to test it, and to allow others to build on it.

Of course, this requires accommodating certain and even frequent failure within the process of experimentation.

What does this look like in practice? Writer Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo recounted a story from jazz artist and scholar Chris Washburne at the World Economic Forum a few years ago:

[A] young Herbie Hancock came to distinguish himself playing keyboard for Miles Davis. In their first show together Hancock hit a chord so ugly that he anticipated disrupting Davis’s solo trumpet performance. Instead, Davis was so in sync with his pianist that he was able to complement with the perfect note and salvage the lost chord and hence the performance. Leadership in this case was demonstrated not in expressing control and reducing spontaneity but enabling those same forces and facilitating the recovery. Mistakes in a jazz band thus are not seen as the opposite of success but instead as an inherent part of it.

And along those lines, General George Patton once observed, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

It’s been said that the sound of surprise is jazz—and if there is anything our organizations need to develop a taste for, it’s this.

Yet the serendipity and improvisation don’t happen in an environment of utter anarchy. There’s a guiding architecture in place, which offers strength and structure that can support the experimentation … and which can sustain momentary failure.

Some organizations will by design follow the exacting standards of classical music. In Steve Jobs’ AppleApple, the product was not finished until it met the meticulous and Mozartian standards of its leader. Yet in many other organizations today, a more jazz-like approach is invaluable … especially given the increasing impermanence and risk of wholesale disruption each new morning.

A jazz-like worldview breaks rigid constraints and boundaries in exploration of different paths. And while leaders and followers are in this context free to experiment and fail, one special benefit is that they are able to sense different, offbeat ways of getting to the right place. An additional benefit is that every member of the improvisational group comes creatively alive in a way that’s not possible in a more tightly controlled regime.

Rob Asghar is the author of Leadership Is Hell: How to Manage Well and Escape with Your Soul, with all proceeds supporting programs to increase college access for under-served youth in the Los Angeles area.

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